The capacity of an NVDIMM REGION (contiguous span of persistent memory) is accessed via one or more
NAMESPACE devices. REGION is the Linux term for what ACPI and UEFI call a DIMM-interleave-set, or a
system-physical-address-range that is striped (by the memory controller) across one or more memory
modules.
The UEFI specification defines the NVDIMMLabelProtocol as the combination of label area access methods
and a data format for provisioning one or more NAMESPACE objects from a REGION. Note that label support
is optional and if Linux does not detect the label capability it will automatically instantiate a
"label-less" namespace per region. Examples of label-less namespaces are the ones created by the kernel’s
memmap=ss!nn command line option (see the nvdimm wiki on kernel.org), or NVDIMMs without a valid
namespaceindex in their label area.
Note
Label-less namespaces lack many of the features of their label-rich cousins. For example, their size
cannot be modified, or they cannot be fully destroyed (i.e. the space reclaimed). A destroy operation
will zero any mode-specific metadata. Finally, for create-namespace operations on label-less
namespaces, ndctl bypasses the region capacity availability checks, and always satisfies the request
using the full region capacity. The only reconfiguration operation supported on a label-less
namespace is changing its mode.
A namespace can be provisioned to operate in one of 4 modes, fsdax, devdax, sector, and raw. Here are the
expected usage models for these modes:
• fsdax: Filesystem-DAX mode is the default mode of a namespace when specifying ndctlcreate-namespace
with no options. It creates a block device (/dev/pmemX[.Y]) that supports the DAX capabilities of
Linux filesystems (xfs and ext4 to date). DAX removes the page cache from the I/O path and allows
mmap(2) to establish direct mappings to persistent memory media. The DAX capability enables workloads
/ working-sets that would exceed the capacity of the page cache to scale up to the capacity of
persistent memory. Workloads that fit in page cache or perform bulk data transfers may not see
benefit from DAX. When in doubt, pick this mode.
• devdax: Device-DAX mode enables similar mmap(2) DAX mapping capabilities as Filesystem-DAX. However,
instead of a block-device that can support a DAX-enabled filesystem, this mode emits a single
character device file (/dev/daxX.Y). Use this mode to assign persistent memory to a virtual-machine,
register persistent memory for RDMA, or when gigantic mappings are needed.
• sector: Use this mode to host legacy filesystems that do not checksum metadata or applications that
are not prepared for torn sectors after a crash. Expected usage for this mode is for small boot
volumes. This mode is compatible with other operating systems.
• raw: Raw mode is effectively just a memory disk that does not support DAX. Typically this indicates a
namespace that was created by tooling or another operating system that did not know how to create a
Linux fsdax or devdax mode namespace. This mode is compatible with other operating systems, but
again, does not support DAX operation.